RL unknotter, hard unknots and unknotting number

arXiv:2603.07955v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: We develop a reinforcement learning pipeline for simplifying knot diagrams. A trained agent learns move proposals and a value heuristic for navigating Reidemeister moves. The pipeline applies to arbitrary knots and links; we test it on “very hard” unknot diagrams and, using diagram inflation, on $4_1#9_{10}$ where we recover the recently established and surprising upper bound of three for the unknotting number.